I have friends who have hard-drive video archives of their favorite hundreds of movies. Another friend has hundreds of DVD’s. I have at least a hundred, and my streaming service subscriptions offer me hundreds more.
Although we could watch many new offerings, more often than not, we choose to watch something familiar. It is comforting. We watch knowing that we are going to see something predictable. I so hate surprises – all of them, but most especially the bad kind like Trump winning a Presidential Election. I guess that is why watching movies that we know is comforting – like eating a favorite meal or visiting a favorite park.
We watched Black Panther the other day. We have watched it at least a dozen times. We often notice details that we have missed on all prior viewings. This time, I noticed something thematic that I had previously not. Black Panther is a movie about a powerful country led by a monarch. I guess one could say that he is an autocrat although he does have a tribal council on which the heads of the country’s tribes sit and advise the king. King T’Challa, like his father before him, is a benevolent leader whose desire is to help his people, protect them, and interfere in the world as little as possible.
The problem with monarchies and autocracies is that when their leaders are malevolent, everything goes to hell. T’Challa’s usurper, Killmonger, is such a man – the malevolent autocrat. He’s the Putin, the Orban, the Xi, the Kim Jong Un, or the Donald Trump.
That’s the problem with autocracies. They inevitably devolve into malignant, self-indulgent dictatorships because the autocratic model is too fragile to endure as a benevolent state. It has no checks and balances or very weak ones, at best. That’s what I see in Black Panther now.
Alas.